>
>
> There are too few people involved in the voting process at the ISO
> working group, whose work is too much opaque for the general public, as
> it is only open to governmental representants. So if there are new votes
> in the ISO 10646 pipe, I really suggest that some voting ISO members
> publish the paper they have to vote on, to receive informed public
> review before they can effectively vote.
>

The ISO working group (ISO/IEC JTC1/SC2/WG2) on the 10646 consists
mainly of representatives from various ISO national bodies. AFAIK most
of these national standards organizations are not-for-profit public
organizations that finance their operation through membership fees and
from the sales of standards (often with some support from the respective
government, though). Some are government bodies, though.

The national bodies have mirror groups that decide on how to vote and
comment on the ballots - and also in the meetings on issues that are
particularly relevant to them. The handling of the rest of the business
at hand is usually trusted on the delegates participating in the
meetings. The SC2/WG2 documents are publicly available on its web site.

The structure for the development of the 10646/Unicode standards allows
all interested parties to participate either through Unicode or their
national bodies. In our particular case, the national mirror group, in
addition to being an open group, also welcomes comments on its Finnish
language website from all interested parties. The openness and
transparency, however, vary from country to country.

Sincerely,
Erkki I. Kolehmainen
Secretary of the Finnish Group on Cultural Diversity Issues in ICT